How many times have you gotten excited about a recipe while flipping through a cookbook or watching a tasty-looking TikTok cooking video, only to notice eggs are part of the ingredient list? For vegans, those with egg allergies, and others, that can be a big bummer. And if you’ve tried to recreate that recipe simply by omitting the eggs, you’ve probably learned a tough lesson – and wished for natural vegan egg substitutes for baking.
“Egg yolks provide the fat, and offer a silky consistency and richness to a recipe,” says Chris Disney, director of operations for Picazzo’s Healthy Italian Kitchen, a health-centric restaurant concept with six locations around Phoenix, Arizona. “Conversely, egg whites are the protein, which provides structure, absorbs air and firms things up.”
Thankfully, there are a handful of tried-and-true ways to replace eggs by using other ingredients that still offer similar baking properties. You might need to do a little experimenting to find which substitution works best in each type of dish, but here are a handful of the options chefs swear by: